Boards

I've just had a look through the NME's top 50 new bands thing and I've also noticed looking through the lineups from smaller stages at festival that loads of new bands just choose one boring noun for their name that doesn't seem to have any meaning or significance.

They're really forgettable and extremely annoying as it takes a few seconds longer to google them. If bands like Cerebral Ballzy and Fist Fuck Deluxe can put some effort into coming up with a good name there's no reason why other bands can't.

Hell yes. **KRYSTL FKK PNDS**. And you must insist that the punctuation be kept intact for all press releases, advertisements, and interviews. In fact, I think the interviewer should have to say "Asterisk, asterisk, kay, arr, why, ess..."

They're great and all, but I spent a long time trying to find one of their long-lost albums on CD, and was driven crazy by the fact that every time I entered their name in a non-Google search engine (i.e. one where you can't search for exact phrase), I got bombarded with hits for James Last albums.

I love them and I think they have an amazing name, I saw them supporting Dinosaur Pile-Up's album launch last year and just ended up doing Jager shots with their singer whilst he signed my EP. They're a really awesome rock band, got the right mix of punk and hard rock to keep me happy.

I'll adore the name of a band for quite some time. In many cases, i've found some wonderful music through intelligent, insightful, or well-thought out names. Four months later, and i'm somewhat embarrassed to have to 'fess up to say "yeah, Pretty Girls Make Graves wrote some great songs". PGMG is a perfect example, now that I think about it. I loved it's early connotations: girls cause heartache. The usage of "graves", for me, complimented the sound and themes of the band. Even having "pretty girls" was a nice juxtaposition. Yet, a year later, I despised it - I'd known of its Smiths-stealing throughout, but it's quite lame in a lot of ways.

Often the sentiment of a name can outweigh the actual name itself. Franz Ferdinand has a cool story. Their want for their bands name to become more synonymous with music, rather than a major catalyst for the second world war, is quite smart and endearing. They might've even done that. But the name itself is really quite poor. It sounds like some bedroom DJ with a rasta hat, a feminine Jonny Greenwood-circa 98 body, with trashy parents... but hey..

I've written many lists of many possible band names. I even thought of 'Cults' in 2008, according to a Word document. Though, I guess that's just an inditement on how poor some band-naming is...